Soul Sculpting Project: One Simple Tool for Building Great Relationships

Who is your most significant relationship with right now?

How’s your Relational Piggy Bank doing?

We keep piggy banks for all our relationships. We make regular deposits and withdrawals. When we keep the bank full we create the needed reserve to help us survive the inevitable withdrawals.

Relationship researcher Dr. John Gottman finds that keeping our Relational Bank full can make the difference between marriages that do last and marriages that do not last.

The good news: making a deposit is a simple, small action.

Deposits

Q. How do we make deposits in our Relational Piggy Bank?

A. Respond to bids for connection with interest and respect .

• When your spouse comes home and calls out, “I’m home!” they are making a bid for connection.
• When you respond with, “Glad you’re back, how did it go today? You have just made a deposit in your Relational Piggy Bank.

• When your spouse says, “Wow, come look at this.” they are making a bid for connection.
• When you respond with interest by coming over to see what they are looking at you have just made another deposit in your Relational Piggy Bank.

You do not have to be deeply interested in what they are showing you or even agree with what they are telling you. To make a deposit you simply need to respond with a degree of interest and respect.

These little deposits add up over time and provide the needed buffer for times of conflict.

Withdrawals

When we are in conflict we make withdrawals from our Relational Bank. The primary problem with withdrawals is that we have to pay a penalty charge.

The charge is 5 to 1.

It takes five positive interactions to cover one negative interaction.

Gottman calls this 5 to 1 the magic ratio. His research demonstrates that healthy relationships need a minimum of 5 positive deposits in the relational bank to buffer 1 negative withdrawal.

In Gottman’s forty years of research, he has found that the attitude of contempt is the number one predictor of divorce.

Contempt is an attitude of superiority. Contempt is cultivated by long-standing negative thoughts about one’s partner.

Q. What is Gottman’s Antidote to Contempt?

A. Build a Culture of Appreciation and Respect.

One of the valuable tools Gottman suggests for building this Culture of Appreciation and respect is:

• Responding to bids for connection with interest and respect.

Soul Sculpting Project: One Simple Tool for Building Great Relationships

1. Pick a relationship to build. Who is it? __________
2. Watch for the next bid for connection from this person.
3. Respond with interest and respect.

Look not only to your own interests but also to interests of others. (Philippians 2:4)

Dr. John Gottman is a researcher who is world-renown for his work on marital stability and divorce prediction. Find more of his work at the Gottman Institute.